1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an authentication system and a method thereof for a wireless network, in particular, to an authentication system using a card technique and a method thereof for a wireless network.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, the conventional cable networks have been gradually replaced by wireless networks so that users can access the Internet or communicate with each other from anywhere covered by a wireless network. Along with the drastic decrease in the cost of wireless network devices, many families, offices, and conference centres have adopt wireless networking as the optimal solution of Internet connection.
However, since wireless networking still belongs to radio wave propagation technique, the communication data within an area covered by a wireless network may be eavesdropped or attached, and accordingly the security, integrity, and eligibility of the communication data may be threatened. The threats caused by the connatural characteristics of a wireless network include eavesdropping, masquerade, replay, message modification, session hijacking, denial-of-services, man-in-the-middle etc.
To protect a wireless network from attack, different security mechanisms are adopted by wireless network devices. In particular, authentication mechanism is the most essential security mechanism for wireless network access, and the design and implementation of an authentication mechanism have to be complete and comprehensive. However, the more comprehensive an authentication mechanism (for example, 802.1X of WiFi and PKMv2 of WiMAX) is, the more complicated the operation thereof is. Thus, a user of the authentication system has to be very careful with all the related configurations, and the work load of the authentication system is very heavy. Moreover, foregoing problems increase the load of both the authentication system and the user while the user accesses the wireless network.
Most existing authentication mechanisms are directly related to the standard specifications of wireless network infrastructures (for example, WiFi, WiMAX, Bluetooth, or 3G etc), the user networking devices and corresponding authentication methods (for example, EAP-SIM for GSM mobile phones, EAP-AKA for 3G mobile phones, EAP-TLS for notebook computers with digital certificates etc), and wireless device specifications regarding operation environments (specification of home WiFi AP, network device specification in an organization, network device specification at a public place). By far, there is not a single method for performing network-independent, device-independent, and environment-independent authentication.
Accordingly, the present invention provides a network-independent, device-independent, and environment-independent authentication system and a method thereof.